Categories

MEET YOUR BLOGGER

I live in the deep south of New Zealand, where smelly dairy cows are taking over from sheep in the livestock stakes. My hometown is the small but perfectly formed city of Invercargill, which is also the hometown of the original boy racer, Burt Munro. Find out more about me here.

Emergency Yodel Button

Archives

Unusual bedfellows generate web hits

Did you miss me last week? Did you wonder if I’d been eaten by a dingo or got lost in the vast wastelands of the Gold Coast.

I did email a column from an internet kiosk in Surfers but it would appear it took a wrong turn somewhere and never made it to this side of the ditch. Never mind, it was probably nothing more than a wine-assisted ramble about how great it is that there are so many internet kiosks on the Gold Coast.

The holiday went well (thanks for asking) apart from returning with our usual souvenirs: yet another broken suitcase (thanks again Air New Zealand) and a few Aussie germs.

And speaking of things that stay the same, it’s nice to see the weird wide web is continuing with its habit of bizarre bedfellows (not literally), with Canadian teeny-bopper Justin Bieber and grown-up, meat-wearing musician Lady GaGa in a race to be the first on YouTube to score one billion views.

I have to admit that until reading that headline the other day I never could have imagined those two singers sharing a headline but there you go: the interweb does it again, giving us a good dose of the unexpected.

Micro-blogging site Twitter has already seen the scramble for top-Tweeter with the likes of Stephen Fry (well worth following), Perez Hilton (a bit too negative), Ashton Kutcher (sick of hearing about his missus) and Barack Obama and I can’t help wondering what will be next.

Since everyone is ready to grab their 15 minutes (or one billion hits) of fame on the net, perhaps it will come down to the battle of the sex tapes. Let’s face it, the web has pretty much been solely responsible for the rising popularity of these instant-fame videos.

So, maybe the next headline will have Paris Hilton racing whatsherface with the big boobies from Baywatch to be the first to score one billion hits for their online bonkfest. Although, the David Hasselhoff drunken burger-eating video will still probably get more traffic than the lot of them because let’s be honest: it’s funny.

But enough of this rambling about Lady GaGa and that Canadian kid, here’s something that does interest me: Microsoft reckons it will have its Slate on the market by Christmas. For those who don’t know, the Slate is Microsoft’s answer to Apple’s iPad, that shiny little bit of kit that has all and sundry drooling with desire. I’m not saying I’m going to buy a Slate, but the more competition there is in the market the better it is for us consumers, so the more the merrier, I say.